Abortion Opponents Cheer Recent Victories in Congress : Politics: At convention, groups say they are ‘batting a thousand.’ Activists discount predictions that presidential candidates will dismiss their views as campaign evolves.

NASHVILLE —  Pumped up by recent political victories, the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization began its annual convention here Thursday with little flexing or strutting, but plenty of talk about renewed commitment to building strength.

National Right to Life Committee President Wanda Franz opened the three-day gathering with a call to push from power “the anti-life, pro-death” Clinton Administration.

As for a replacement for Clinton, Franz and other committee leaders were noncommittalabout their preferences among the Republican presidential candidates, most of whom have taken anti-abortion stands. But the anti-abortion activists brushed off some pundits’ assertions that their issue will probably be shunted aside as candidates attempt to broaden their appeal to the entire electorate.

Franz said it will not be necessary for such Republican candidates as Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Texas Sen. Phil Gramm to focus on abortion, given that they have made clear their opposition to it: “They don’t have to get up every morning and shout it out the window.”

One of the convention’s speakers, Richard D. Land, compared anti-abortion forces to an awakened giant whose issue can no longer be ignored. “We should not be concerned whether we support a candidate for office,” he said. “We should be concerned that candidates for office support us.”

Land, executive director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Christian Life Commission, helped set the tone for the conclave as he declared that “the protection of human life, from conception to natural death” is the “transcendent moral issue of our time.”

A spokeswoman for the convention predicted that it would draw 1,200 committee activists.

In contrast to last year’s convention, which began the morning the U.S. Supreme Court approved 36-foot “bubble zones” to keep anti-abortion protesters away from medical clinics, this year’s event came the day after the House voted to eliminate aid to organizations performing legal or illegal abortions abroad.

Members were also energized, said Franz, by the derailment last week of Clinton’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr., who sparked opposition largely because he had performed abortions during his medical career.

The Right to Life group helped prevent Foster’s nomination from coming before the Senate for a vote by using methods ranging from lobbying and letter writing to helping Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.) prepare a graphic display of a rare late-term abortion procedure that he presented to his stunned Senate colleagues.

And Foster’s rejection came a week after the passage of a House appropriations measure that would ban abortions for military women stationed overseas.

Ann Stone, who heads the abortion rights group Republicans for Choice, predicted that the tone of the Nashville convention would be “ecstatic. . . . They’re batting a thousand.”

*

Franz, however, said that members see the abortion issue as “a long-haul struggle. You’re not going to find pro-lifers saying, ‘Yeah! We won! Now we can go home and bake cookies.’ ”

Upcoming issues on the committee’s agenda, convention speakers said, include legislation to prohibit federal or state governments from “discriminating against medical programs or medical students who refuse to train or be trained in abortions.”

Committee leaders also indicated that their group will begin focusing more intently on opposing health care “rationing,” which is seen by some as “a slippery slope” leading to a society in which people whose illnesses are deemed “inconvenient” are allowed to die through refusal of treatment.

The anti-abortion movement takes considerable credit for having defeated what members scrupulously refer to as “the Clinton health care rationing plan.” But committee leaders concede that the “rationing” issue becomes more complicated as Republican congressional leaders propose managed care as part of their bottom-line solutions to eliminating the federal budget deficit.

Committee leaders have fashioned guidelines that they say would enable lawmakers to reform the funding of Medicare and Medicaid without inadvertently encouraging health care providers to prematurely pull the plug on patients.

Other emerging aspects of the GOP conservative agenda have also raised concerns with the Right to Life Committee. For instance, the group’s board of directors voted in January to oppose any welfare reform measure that would cut off support for young mothers. The group fears such cuts would increase the motivation of these women to abort.

*

And at a workshop titled “Hispanic Voting Patterns and What They Mean to the Movement,” speaker Raimundo Rojas warned of a similar conflict. The nation’s Latinos are predisposed to oppose abortion and are ripe for conversion to conservatism, he said. But he added that they will quickly abandon GOP candidates who support immigration policies patterned after California’s Proposition 187, which would deny most public services to illegal immigrants.

The National Right to Life Committee boasts 3,000 chapters in all 50 states, and there is no reason to doubt organizers’ claims that all 50 are represented at the convention, where children in T-shirts with anti-abortion slogans, giggly adolescents belonging to the affiliate organization Teens for Life and senior citizens browsed through booths displaying bumper stickers, videotapes and medical models of fetuses.

Several convention workshops are geared toward informing members about medical issues, such as “Fetology and Fetal Tissue Transplants,” or the abortion drug RU-486. Most, however, deal with fund raising, press relations and political tactics.

* RELATED STORY: A35